Call for Abstracts 

Care, Gender, and Changing Intergenerational Relations in Urban Asia

This symposium invites scholars working on care, gender and intergenerational relations in the contexts of East and South Asia. The purpose of the symposium is to bring such scholarship into dialogue, to further knowledge around how care is a key site through which intergenerational contracts, patriarchal authority, and gendered inequalities are being reworked under shifting institutional and structural conditions across the region.

Symposium abstract: 

Both East and South Asia have historically organised social and economic life along patriarchal, patrilocal, and patrilineal principles, marked by a son-centred intergenerational contract. However, with urbanisation, women’s expanding participation in education and paid work, growing affluence, demographic transition, and the diversification of family forms,  intergenerational relations have been reshaped in complex and uneven ways. This is evident through increases in uxorilocal marriage, bilateral family arrangements, the growing salience of care flows along the matrilineal line, closer intimate ties between grown daughters and their parents, and emerging daughter preference. Yet, these shifts do not necessarily dismantle patriarchal power. Instead, patriarchy frequently reconstitutes itself through new moral idioms of choice, intimacy, and reciprocity, redistributing obligations while preserving gendered asymmetries in labour, care, autonomy, and recognition. 

This symposium centres care work and asks how care practices contribute to rewriting intergenerational relations, and at what cost. In doing so, it addresses the broader question of how patriarchy is reimagined, challenged, accommodated, or resisted in everyday negotiations between generations and across genders. By bringing East and South Asia into comparative dialogue, the symposium explores how care is a key site through which intergenerational contracts, patriarchal authority, and gendered inequalities are being reworked under shifting institutional and structural conditions across the region.

Organisers: 

Lisa Eklund, Associate Professor of Sociology, Lund University and coming Leverhulme Trust visiting professor at OSGA, University of Oxford. lisa.eklund@soc.lu.se

Taanya Kapoor, Research Student, Department of International Development, University of Oxford and Principal Project Scientist for STEMtheGap at IIT Delhi, India.taanya.kapoor@sant.ox.ac.uk

Format: One full-day symposium on Friday 6 November 2026 hosted at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. Each sessions will include individual presentations (15-20 min) followed by a joint discussion. The last activity of the day will be a discussion about main takeaways and future directions and activities. 

Lunch and coffee will be provided to participants. 

Planned outcome: One planned outcome of the symposium is to compile a proposal for a special issue on the symposium theme. Select participants will be expected to submit full papers in the future to be considered for publication.

Travel: Travel costs will be covered for up to six participants outside of Oxford.

Please submit your abstract (max 250 words) no later than 1 September 2026 by emailing: 

caregendersymposium2026@gmail.com

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.